Tuesday, 26 March 2013

The system of a game in which everyone is a player
The game an enclosed systemThere is no outside. The roadside is not an outside.To play the game you need the tokens
which permit you to make the moves
that keep the game going. (Outside and inside are the same.)Some do well at this gamebut it's getting dark nowand some don't want to play.

The Goya is a sketch for a cartoon intended for a tapestry to decorate the bedroom of the Infantes in the Palace of El Pardo. The sketch is now in the Prado. The puppet-like figures gathered on the banks of the Manzanares, attired in the latest Parisian fashions, are engaged in a popular aristocratic society pastime. Everyone is in on the game, though some are also on the outside -- to be blinded is to be excluded from society, if only for a time. This seems a figure applicable in a larger sense to social institutions in general. As the world gradually draws into a "global unit", knitted together by the networks stitched into everyone's private arrangements, there is increasingly an objective penalty for being excluded from these networked arrangements. At the same time, however, seeing these arrangements clearly and objectively from the inside is impossible. Only by being cut adrift, stranded on the outside, does one begin to make out the workings of the game, in general outline -- indeed, to make out that it is a game, and not a "natural" state of things. The "natural" state of things, if such a thing ever existed, is now forgotten. All that is left, effectively, is the game, and the players, who, enclosed by their socially enforced subscription to what is perceived as an inevitable and necessary condition, would not be able to escape even if the inchoate impulse to escape became a conscious motive.

The social world of Goya can be seen as closer to our own than that of Bruegel. The medieval children's games depicted by Bruegel have the sprawling variety of a less strictly organized world. There are collective games, games played by small groups and pairs, and solitary games; there are children playing cooperatively, and gently; but there are also the bullies, the ones who play roughly. The system of arrangements is more open and various, less well defined, less easily mistaken as an absolute.

We have moved away from the world of Bruegel, through the world of Goya, to the world we have now.